Relatively Old HDDs
- Thread starter goku2100
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Sorry guys that I didn't reply quickly enough.. Well I was pleasantly surprised to see how little power these drives consumed when I tested it out (hooked up the system to "kill-a-watt" and when I booted the system up, it peaked out at 130 watts then 90 and idle it was about 60 watts! With all drives connected!
This IS an old tower (AT Tower) with a 250 WATT PSU (transworld) 8bay. Asus P/I-P55T2P4 motherboard K6 II processor 450MHZ, 128MB EDO ram with a promise Ultra 100 controller card (to add more drives). It seems that at first all the drives have died but currently I'm working on my second "data" drive that was used in this system. (Had 5 drives, all stopped functioning, now trying to get at least one drive to load the OS one at a time). List of drives: Fujistu '97 S.M.A.R.T Failed, 3.6GB, western digital caviar sept '97 2.5GB,'96 2.5Gb, '95 1.5GB and Quantum '96 3.5GB. I recently purchased 3 relatively small capacity drives for $5 from an electronics teacher incase I can't get these drives to work. I need these drives because I plan to build a minimum of 4 200GB file server and would use these drive(s) to boot up the system (which ever works) and possibly have them fill up unused slots in the system until I need them.
One thing I've been noticing lately is that when I try to install windows 2000 (blue screen area when loading drivers) the 24X optical drive would spin up, load a driver then spin down therefore making installation quite slow (could this be related in anyway?)
enough info?
This IS an old tower (AT Tower) with a 250 WATT PSU (transworld) 8bay. Asus P/I-P55T2P4 motherboard K6 II processor 450MHZ, 128MB EDO ram with a promise Ultra 100 controller card (to add more drives). It seems that at first all the drives have died but currently I'm working on my second "data" drive that was used in this system. (Had 5 drives, all stopped functioning, now trying to get at least one drive to load the OS one at a time). List of drives: Fujistu '97 S.M.A.R.T Failed, 3.6GB, western digital caviar sept '97 2.5GB,'96 2.5Gb, '95 1.5GB and Quantum '96 3.5GB. I recently purchased 3 relatively small capacity drives for $5 from an electronics teacher incase I can't get these drives to work. I need these drives because I plan to build a minimum of 4 200GB file server and would use these drive(s) to boot up the system (which ever works) and possibly have them fill up unused slots in the system until I need them.
One thing I've been noticing lately is that when I try to install windows 2000 (blue screen area when loading drivers) the 24X optical drive would spin up, load a driver then spin down therefore making installation quite slow (could this be related in anyway?)
enough info?
The main drive was connected to the MB but then tried to hook it up to the promise controller (after I removed the initial controller drivers) but it still failed. Then tried to hook it up back to the main controller but it seems the drive is dead. It looks like 2 of the 5 drives have come back to life (ran WD diagnostic and it found bad sectors on the 2GB drive but when I ran it agian it couldn't find anymore). I ran the WD diagnostic on the other 3 drives and each time I ran the diagnostic, the program would find bad sectors and later claim it "fixed it" but when ran it agian, the same sectors were detected..
I installed windows on the 1.2GB drive but quickly ran out of space and then each time I started windows, it would give me a quick blue screen then would restart. I'm currently running windows on the 2GB drive and seems to be working fine (the other drive most likely has a software issue).
I installed windows on the 1.2GB drive but quickly ran out of space and then each time I started windows, it would give me a quick blue screen then would restart. I'm currently running windows on the 2GB drive and seems to be working fine (the other drive most likely has a software issue).
Ok then.....
The bad sector issue - if the diagnostic utility finds bad sectors on the drive, all it can do is hide them so that they are not used (ie nothing tries to read/write from that sector). It can't actually fix them unfortunately. This may explain why the utility was finding the same bad sectors when you ran it the second time. Make sure though that the utility is actually marking them as bad & not just detecting them. If they're not marked, they will cause a problem & the disk utilities will continue to find again & again.
The utility (I'm not that familiar with WD diag), may very well find the bad sectors again even after marking them but it should distinguish them as marked as opposed to new ones.
One way of checking whether all bad sectors have been marked, is by high level formatting the drive. i.e. format [drive letter:] in DOS. Do not use the quick format switch (/q) though. If the format completes successfully without getting stuck & displaying 'attempting to recover allocation unit' at any point, then they have all been marked.
Apart from that, you could hook up the drives one at a time on the secondary IDE controller on the mobo & test them. I wouldn't connect them via the Promise controller at this stage, in case it's the promise controller thats causing the problem.
The bad sector issue - if the diagnostic utility finds bad sectors on the drive, all it can do is hide them so that they are not used (ie nothing tries to read/write from that sector). It can't actually fix them unfortunately. This may explain why the utility was finding the same bad sectors when you ran it the second time. Make sure though that the utility is actually marking them as bad & not just detecting them. If they're not marked, they will cause a problem & the disk utilities will continue to find again & again.
The utility (I'm not that familiar with WD diag), may very well find the bad sectors again even after marking them but it should distinguish them as marked as opposed to new ones.
One way of checking whether all bad sectors have been marked, is by high level formatting the drive. i.e. format [drive letter:] in DOS. Do not use the quick format switch (/q) though. If the format completes successfully without getting stuck & displaying 'attempting to recover allocation unit' at any point, then they have all been marked.
Apart from that, you could hook up the drives one at a time on the secondary IDE controller on the mobo & test them. I wouldn't connect them via the Promise controller at this stage, in case it's the promise controller thats causing the problem.
Yea I've never been able to clarify for sure if whether or not dos would when formatting, would check for bad sectors and work around them or not.
It seems like the WD diag is not able to hide the sectors like I thought it would but can't understand why it could fix/hide the sectors on the other drives...
It seems like the WD diag is not able to hide the sectors like I thought it would but can't understand why it could fix/hide the sectors on the other drives...
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